Soon after winning New York City’s mayoral election, [Zohran Mamdani quietly shelved the proposal for free bus fare](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/04/10/lsao-a10.html) which became a centerpiece of his campaign. Instead, transit officials in New York City are pursuing the opposite goal: Making it easier to identify and penalize riders who do not pay.

At the May 20 board meeting of the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), New York City Transit President Demetrius Crichlow highlighted the agency’s efforts to ramp up bus fare enforcement through its deployment of EAGLE teams, roving squads of MTA Special Inspectors, clad in tactical vests, who board buses to check riders’ proof of payment and enforce the agency’s campaign against unpaid fares.

Crichlow reported that inspectors are being equipped to issue electronic summonses and that the MTA is piloting fare inspections while buses remain in motion, rather than holding vehicles at stops while passengers are checked one by one.

Although EAGLE fare-inspection teams predate the Mamdani administration, the phaseout of MetroCards and transition to OMNY payment system in January of this year marked a significant new stage in the program. The MTA has expanded checks systemwide to include local bus routes, often targeting working-class areas where non-payment is more common.

The outcome of the promise of free bus fare has lessons for the [40,000 subway and bus workers who have been working on an expired contract](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/05/26/ecxk-m26.html) for more than two weeks. In contract talks, MTA management is demanding 2 percent annual wage increases (less than half the rate of local inflation), along with a doubling of out of pocket healthcare payments and sharp restrictions on overtime and sick leave. It claims that anything else is “unaffordable” and must be offset through fare hikes.

Zohran Mamdani promised free buses; New Yorkers are getting a bus fare enforcement crackdown instead